Professor Carl Good
Email: carlgood@indiana.edu
S668 Topics in 19th-Century Spanish-American Literature
Topic: "Sublime Rhythms: 19th Century Hispanic American
Poetry"
TR 9:30am – 10:45am/class# 25510/3 cr./Location TBA
This seminar will examine issues related to the problem of Hispanic
American literary modernity in the mid-to-late 19th century by means
of a theoretical exploration of rhythm. We will be particularly
interested in seeing how the study of rhythm revitalizes and “makes
newly strange” the work of poets who, although still powerfully
iconized today in the Latin American context, are rarely read in any
meaningful way. Poets studied will include Heredia, Gómez de
Avellaneda, Echeverría, Darío and Asunción Silva.
The seminar will focus as singularly as possible on specific poetic
texts and contexts, but it will also constitute a study of rhythm in
a more general sense, placing it, for example, in relation to
problems of semiology, theories of the sublime, and that very
interesting border between literary theory and theology (of
interest, for example, in the study of poetic mysticism). Writers
in these various theoretical areas will include Kant, Nietzsche,
Deleuze, Kristeva, Derrida and de Man. Much of our focus in the
seminar will be comparatist, as we look at how Spanish language
poetry compares to the texture and dynamics of poetry in other
languages and periods. As such, the seminar should be of interest
to students working on poetic contexts outside of Hispanic American
romanticism/modernismo as well, including early modern and 20th
century contexts.
The final weeks of the seminar will assume a workshop format in
which students will work closely with the professor and other
seminar participants on the formulation of their final papers.
Students wishing to devote their final projects to areas beyond the
19th-century Hispanic American context will be welcome to do so.